


88°

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-04
Updated: 2011-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-02 15:42:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1058578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock gets a bit overheated and slightly tetchy. Thankfully, he doesn’t have Dave’s Syndrome.</p>
            </blockquote>





	88°

It was hot. Stupidly, mind-blisteringly, if there were a legal limit for the temperature of London, the weather would be thrown into prison for reckless endangerment of everybody, hot. At some point in it, Sherlock had shucked his dressing gown and taken to sprawling on the sofa in his pyjamas with everything from the freezer that wasn’t an experiment, and every fan in the house (and probably a few nicked from Mrs Turner) aimed at him.

Seeing this upon wandering into the sitting room from a pleasantly cool shower, John shook his head and attempted to rearrange Sherlock’s fan array to try to form some sort of artificial cross-breeze.

“Mine. Don’t touch,” Sherlock said gruffly.

“You could, you know, take off your shirt or something,” John said. “You are allowed to do that when it gets hot.”

“Nope,” Sherlock said simply.

The reply was so straightforward and simple that John had difficulty recovering from it. No reason. No logic. Just no. He eventually decided to ignore it, and reached for the fan again, only to be hit in the face with a bag of soggy peas.

It certainly wasn’t modesty. John had figured that much out fairly quickly, if Sherlock barging in on showers was anything to go by. And it did make sense that Sherlock, who considered himself a man of science, wouldn’t be very shy at all about issues like nudity. He just seemed to insist on wearing clothes.

John had timed him getting dressed once, just out of sheer amazement. That particular time, Sherlock had gone into his room wearing pyjamas, and returned fully dressed in just under 45 seconds. Until then, he had always assumed those quick-change artists were up to some sort of trickery. Afterward, he became fairly certain that Sherlock could bend time.

Three days later, and the temperature of London had risen to even more impossible levels than before. It was too hot to eat, too hot to sleep, and too hot to think.

They had both taken to several cold showers a day, and over the course of the heat wave, Sherlock seemed to have acquired every oscillating fan in Southern England. John wove his way through the maze Sherlock had created, chuckling to himself.

“I hope there haven’t been any reported cases of Dave’s Syndrome lately,” he said lightly.

Sherlock craned his neck to look at John. “What?” he asked. It was almost enough to make him want to get up from the sofa to fetch his laptop to see what John was on about this time, but that thing did get awfully warm and he had just managed to get reasonably comfortable.

“Nothing,” John said.

He pulled an ice pack from the freezer and a bottled water from the fridge, taking both back through the maze to Sherlock.

“Shorts?” he asked, trading the ice and water for Sherlock’s previous ice pack, which was now a melted mess.

“Haven’t got any,” Sherlock said. "And pants are not an option.”

“Presumably _not_ because you don’t have any of those, either?” John asked. He reached out to feel the side of Sherlock’s face. “You’re not sweating. Drink. That’s an order.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and cracked open the water, making a show of drinking it for John.

“I am actually considering asking Mycroft to pay for having central air installed in this house,” Sherlock said.

“That miserable, huh?” asked John. He returned the used ice pack to the freezer before finding his way to his armchair. “I’m surprised you’re not bored. You haven’t moved all week.”

“Too hot to be bored,” Sherlock said. “Contemplating the effects of heat exhaustion has been keeping me busy enough.”

John gave him a worried look. “You will let me know if you start to feel ill?” he asked.

“I don’t feel ill, I feel hot,” Sherlock reminded him tiredly.

“Have you eaten anything?” asked John.

“No. Too hot,” Sherlock said. He stared up at the ceiling. “Then I really will be sick.”

John frowned. “If I go out and fetch you something to drink, will you?”

“Not promising anything.”

John sighed. He’d lived with Sherlock long enough to know the difference in tone between ‘don’t bother,’ and ‘don’t expect results,’ but was hesitant about leaving the man alone for longer than a few minutes.

“Just go,” Sherlock told him. “It’ll take you five minutes to go to Speedy’s and back. I’m not going to die of brain damage in that amount of time.”

After a brief hesitation, John pulled on his shirt and slipped out of the flat. While John was gone, Sherlock repositioned his ice pack to right over his face, and had managed to move several of the fans without appearing to have moved an inch from the sofa.

John returned to the flat with several bottles of juice and a cold sandwich, offering the lot to Sherlock. After a few seconds, Sherlock removed his ice pack from his face to stare down the juice and sandwich, as though doing so might make them disappear. Finally, he snatched the bottle of orange juice from John and pointed at the sandwich.

“Put that in the freezer for about five minutes, and then bring it back,” he said.

Taking that as the victory it was, John did as he was instructed. He put the remaining juice bottles in the fridge and returned to the sitting room to find a very confused-looking Lestrade standing in the door.

“No, go away. I’m dying,” Sherlock told him, burying his face into the side of the sofa.

Lestrade cast a concerned glance toward John.

“He’s a bit overheated,” John explained. “And not letting me do much about it.”

Lestrade looked back over at Sherlock and laughed slightly. “Oh, you’re not still sore about that, are you? That was ages ago.”

“Shut up,” Sherlock warned, his face still buried in imitation leather.

Still, it was too much for John to resist. “Ages ago?” he asked.

“Yeah. What was it, Sherlock? Four years ago?” asked Lestrade.

“Shut up.”

Lestrade ignored him. “He still hadn’t cleaned up yet, and one of our teams found him at a bust. High as a kite without a stitch on, and they took him in exactly as they found him.”

John fought back a laugh. “What, that’s why he won’t take his damn shirt off?” he asked. “He’s paranoid that you’ll come in and drag him off to the station?”

“Well, to be fair, we do prefer that when we drag people off to the station, they are wearing something,” Lestrade said, fighting back laughter of his own by this point. “But that doesn’t always work when the person in question burned everything, because what was it, Sherlock? Leprechauns?”

Sherlock rolled into the back of the sofa. “Fuck you both,” he groaned.

John’s eyebrows arched dramatically at the expletive. He turned to Lestrade and nodded at the door. “I don’t think he’s well enough to be going out today,” he said. “If you still need him after it cools off a bit, you know where to find him.”

Lestrade nodded and turned to leave, back to whatever crime scene had baffled him this time.

“You know,” John said. “The police don’t just arrest people for the hell of it. There’s typically a reason.”

“Yes they do,” Sherlock argued. “They do it all the time. And I don’t care what Lestrade says. ‘Being an insufferable prig know-it-all’ is not an arrest-able offense.”

John failed to hold back his laugher as he went to fetch the sandwich from the freezer, hoping to distract Sherlock from this train of thought by annoying him with the concept of eating on a day that wasn’t Thursday.

  



End file.
